SEM Tycoon

**Mike** · 12-09-2006, 06:23 PM

Anybody here running ads via this company, or used them in the past?

Giving them a try on my sites for a while to see how they do. The claim is they normally do better than adsense, time will tell. Instead of contextual ads, what their system is supposed to do is display ads based on where your traffic comes from or goes to after leaving your site.

Naturally, there is learning period so I don't expect the income to be that good from the start, but if they can out-perform adsense and YPN ads, I am going to really like this company.

Basically, the ads that are being shown on my site are yahoo/overture ads, the same ads that are run on YPN. The difference is, I dont have "ads by yahoo" or "ads by google" displaying. Other than that, the ads look almost the same.

Here is how they look (ads below the four images)
http://www.mudbog.net/gallery/showgallery.php/cat/512

So far, on the 728x90 ad, I have only seen a maximum of 3 ads displayed together, never 4 ads side by side.

**Batesy** · 12-09-2006, 07:05 PM

It only learns about the visitor if they visit other websites wihtin RS's network though, so how effective can it really be?

**Mike** · 12-09-2006, 07:19 PM

According to their site, not sure how true it is, they reach 85% of internet traffic via the sites that are in their network.

I looked into this for several months before deciding to give it a try.

Many of the sites/companies involved with them don't necessarily run their ads, but use them for behavioral studies. I thought this was a crazy scheme when it first came out, but it appears to be growing rather quickly

**beachbumis** · 12-09-2006, 09:04 PM

There was a podcast by iMedia (I think) about behavioral marketing. Sorry I don't have a link for you, my podcatcher picked it up for me. If interested PM me and I will see if I can find it.

Michael

**imported_illusion** · 12-10-2006, 07:04 AM

What payout are we looking here? Same as adsense?

**Mike** · 12-10-2006, 12:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by illusion

What payout are we looking here? Same as adsense?

It is pay per click. Whether it will perform better or not, at least for me, remains to be seen. I just started running their ads on Friday evening. The thing I like the most is the fact that I don't have google or yahoo advertising themselves on my site for free. All you see are the actual ads, instead of the google or yahoo text underneath.

**Mike** · 12-12-2006, 02:10 PM

To update this,

I have removed the ads from the site I was getting my best adsense results on. I like the idea of not having to display the "ads by google" on my site, but this simply didn't seem to be working.

Ads were not being responded to by visitors, very low clickthrough ratio, and for the most part I was seeing ads that I just couldn't imagine being in any way relevant to my site's demographics.

There may be an adjustment period for the proper ads to begin displaying, but after 5 days, the ads had not changed to what I think they should have, and income was down to roughly 20% of what I had been making. I can't let something like that continue without at least a little communication. After asking some questions to my account manager and going 36 hours without a response, that was enough for me to take the ads down.

Never know until you try though.

**beachbumis** · 12-13-2006, 09:19 PM

Don't know until you try. Thanks for posting an update.

Michael